| The Water-Method Man Contributor(s): Irving, John (Author) |
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ISBN: 034541800X ISBN-13: 9780345418005 Publisher: Ballantine Books OUR PRICE: $14.40 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: June 1997 Annotation: The main character of John Irving's second novel, written when the author was twenty-nine, is a perpetual graduate student with a birth defect in his urinary tract--and a man on the threshold of committing himself to a second marriage that bears remarkable resemblance to his first.... "Three or four times as funny as most novels." THE NEW YORKER "From the Paperback edition. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Fiction | Literary - Fiction | Psychological - Fiction | Fantasy - Contemporary |
| Dewey: FIC |
| LCCN: 97093202 |
| Series: Ballantine Reader's Circle |
| Physical Information: 0.78" H x 5.58" W x 8.29" (0.58 lbs) 288 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: "John Irving, it is abundantly clear, is a true artist."--Los Angeles Times Fred Bogus Trumper has troubles. A divorced, broke graduate student of Old Norse in 1970s New York, Trumper is a wayward knight-errant in the battle of the sexes and the pursuit of happiness: His ex-wife has moved in with his childhood best friend, his life is the subject of a tell-all movie, and his chronic urinary tract infection requires surgery. Trumper is determined to change. There's only one problem: it seems the harder he tries to alter his adolescent ways, the more he is drawn to repeating the mistakes of the past. . . . Written when Irving was twenty-nine, Trumper's tale of woe is told with all the wit and humor that would become Irving's trademark. "Three or four times as funny as most novels."--The New Yorker Praise for The Water-Method Man "Friendship, marriage, and family are his primary themes, but at that blundering level of life where mishap and folly--something close to joyful malice--perpetually intrude and distrupt, often fatally. Life, in John] Irving's fiction, is always under siege. Harm and disarray are daily fare, as if the course of love could not run true. . . . Irving's multiple manner . . . his will to come at the world from different directions, is one of the outstandint traits of The World According to Garp, but this remarkable flair for . . . stories inside stories . . . isalready handled with mastery . . . and with a freedom almost wanton in The Water-Method Man which is Garp's predecessor by six years]."--Terrence Des Pres "Brutal reality and hallucination, comedy and pathos. A rich, unified tapestry."--Time |